It doesn't half pay at the WMCA

In March, the West Midlands Combined Authority spent £4.5 million on consultants, a step up from the first two months of the year when its 1,226 staff paid almost £3.7 million for ‘consultants, external advice, legal advice and professional advice’.

It’s not just going to lawyers, accountants, engineers and so on.

Recipients include a digital marketing expert, a communications specialist, an artist and an actress who ‘works with the The Laban-Malmgren System of Character Analysis, the Stanislavski Method and live improvised music to discover and awaken inner lives and physical responses’.

Birmingham Hippodrome theatre got £10,000 (How to put on a decent panto? Oh no it wasn’t).

Dr Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt offers ‘unparalleled knowledge of creative health at the intersection between practice, policy and evidence’.

Good Afternoon Experiences Ltd got £9,100. They ‘conceptualise and lead the creative direction of playful installations and experiences and games that incorporate creative technology, play or interaction.’ Well, it’s more interesting than bus shelters.

But then, the West Midlands Combined Authority has an embarrassment of riches which it can’t spend fast enough.

In the 2023-24 financial year, it had £591.9 million to spend on the Midland Metro, railways, social housing decarbonisation and so on. Alas, it only managed to get £386 million out the door.

A proper business would be delighted to spend £215.3 million less than planned but in the public sector it’s a disaster. How do you justify your unending demand for more money when you can’t get rid of what you’ve already got?

And they’re plainly understaffed, having paid £250,000 to Hays Specialist Recruitment in January, £286,000 in February and £534,297.83 in March.

As for staff, like a good employer, they’ve paid £1,484 to Back Care Solutions, £1,913 to Posturite and £7,740 to New Leaf Health to help them hit their ‘workplace wellbeing goals’.

They’ve also set aside £1 million to pay for untaken holiday entitlement.

The Labour Party doesn’t do badly either. The authority paid £16,998.57 in January and another £8,258.62 in February to the Labour Party to cover the employment costs of people seconded to work in the office of Mayor Richard Parker.

Luckily, Mayor Parker has secured more money from the Government with a £1.2 billion budget this year which ‘includes £389m as part of the government's Integrated Settlement, which gives the authority power, funding and responsibility for local priorities’. And that’s before the billions to allow Blues fans to get to their new football ground by tram.